A New Kind of Mind

Viewing the news at this time of protests around George Floyd’s death is hard to watch sometimes but also engenders an excitement about the possibility of real change. Lasting change always happens in chaos. When it is cold in Seattle and a warm front comes in, it is windy. We are living in a windy time, which is blowing away old beliefs and deeply entrenched positions in all our minds.

I am here to say that you can truly make a difference during this time. You don’t have to protest if that doesn’t call to you, but you can vote, (and please vote!) and you can have honest talks with human beings that you formerly held at arm’s length. But most importantly you can make a difference by shifting your perceptions of the world.

What do I mean by that? I invite you to come sit on the moon with me. To step back and look at the unfolding of life on our planet from this broader perspective will help you to see that life is a constantly unfolding process. Another important thing you can see is that since the moment human beings started to think, they have been using a dualistic mind. It thinks in opposites – what is right and what is wrong; what is good and what is bad; setting up what it likes against what it doesn’t like.

This kind of mind is seen clearly in how some police deal with black people. But it has been around since the beginning of the human experiment. This kind of mind created the caste system in India and the class system in Great Britain. It also created social systems in every country of our world with the ruling class on the top and the laboring class on the bottom. This kind of mind does not see that every single human being is an essential thread in the tapestry of life, a unique creation that life brought forth because they are a necessary part of the whole.

The dualistic kind of mind allowed for decades the ongoing lynching of black men and women with impunity. It also made it possible for police to brutally beat Rodney King in 1991 and even though it was captured on video, the police officers were acquitted (along with countless other black men and women who have been brutalized for many, many years) It also allowed Hitler to convince the German people that the white race was pure and everyone else was not so this gave him permission to kill millions of people who he thought got in the way of his white Aryan agenda.

This kind of mind has also sanctioned the belief that women were less than men, so it was all right to own them, control them, enslave them and deny them the right to vote. It has also convinced so many of us that our main value is in our looks and it has caused us to endlessly try to change ourselves through diets, plastic surgery and over exercising. It has even allowed people to devalue human beings because of the color of their skin in the black community. Colorism says the lighter your skin, the more you are valued. Our dualistic mind even took Jesus’s message of love and turned it into the belief that he died because we are miserable sinners.

How can we come out of this dualistic stance with life? How can we learn how to use our mind for the wonderful tool it is, rather than being lost in its running commentary, so that our heart brain, which science has shown is our main brain, can become our guide through life? For me, one of the most powerful ways is to really let in the message of the yin and yang symbol. Dark and light are not on opposite sides of the line; they are nestled together and in the dark is a point of light and in the light is a point of dark.

The dualistic mind instead has dark and light on opposite sides of a line where light is good, and dark is bad. This is why the devil is often painted in black and angels in white. And this is why, deeply embedded in many of us, is an unconscious reaction to darker skin.

The way that you can make a difference is to get to know how the dualistic mind lives inside of you – how it compares, judges, categorizing people by their skin color, their sexuality, their religion, their beliefs, their looks and on and on. It even thinks tall people are more together than short people. How insane! It is also very powerful to see how it defines people as less than you or greater than you. (There is nobody less than you or greater than you because you are a unique creation of life!)

If you doubt that the dualistic mind lives inside of you, just think of the last big argument you had, and you will see it in full force. If you haven’t had a big argument lately, think of people with political beliefs different than yours and you will see the judging, comparing mind in all of its glory. The divisiveness you see on the news is at times heartbreaking, for the dualistic mind loves the stance that I am right and you are wrong and at times it will defend, almost to death, it’s right to be right and to make you wrong.

Be willing to see that you too have been caught a lot in a dualistic mind. Before that creates a judgmental reaction inside of you, realize that your mind is made up of all the different moving pieces, which make up everybody else’s mind! I had this epiphany when Stephen Levine said he was going to create a hat and when he put it on your head, it would instantaneously broadcast over a loudspeaker all your thoughts. Of course, everybody in the room groaned. But he said we would know freedom because we would finally see that we are all caught in the same kind of mind. Maybe you have more of this kind of thinking and less than that, but our minds are eerily the same.

Be courageous enough to watch your mind and discover how to connect with your world beyond its dualistic struggle. I assure you, the time and effort it takes to see your mind rather than being lost in it is so well worth. This allows your beautiful, aware heart to come out from behind the walls that your mind has sealed it in. This will help you to meet every single human being with the understanding that they are a unique and necessary thread in the tapestry of life and engage them with respect and a willingness to listen.

Your heart brain knows there’s only one of us here. There are not different races just simply the human race, which is made up of people of all shapes and sizes, all walks of life, different religions, different skin colors, different sexual interests and a variety of socio-economic diversity.

To move from your heart brain will bring joy into your life, the kind of joy you waited for, for a long time. It will also bring a peace on our planet that we have been moving towards for a long, long time. Or, as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Be willing to become a part of this major healing that is happening right before our eyes! Be courageous enough to live from your heart brain rather than the dualistic mind, which has caused so much heartache on our planet.